Pressure of the Return (2016–2020)

“Extended Views a narrow Mind extend; Push out its corrugate, expansive Make.” 
—Edward Young, The Consolation, 1745

Humble in both design and construction, the pleated ups and downs of corrugated cardboard give the inexpensive material a true sense of architectural strength. The corrugation — its dips, its folds, its contracted, undulating wrinkles in time — are no different from the folds of Baroque art that spoke to qualities of the human soul, symbolising today in the 21st century a sense of empowerment for the public citizen, as we enable our material usage to be among the most visible, commonplace, and transportable habits of consumerism of post-industrial, late capitalist society. My work as an artist began in 2016 through an anxious habit of collecting this street waste for playful sculptural manipulation — mixing indeterminacy with strength — and allowing it to accumulate within the studio, be deconstructed into varied materialist forms, and be re-assembled via improvised site-specific installations for public interaction and reflection (see ‘Pressure of the Return’, 2016).

These bundled stacks have traversed the streets of Philadelphia and New York, which I later carried with me and re-accumulated within several boroughs of London and on the island of Venice. Such cardboard has remained sprawled from the spontaneity of pop-up marketplaces and one-off deliveries, yet always tidied by waste collectors on scheduled days in these great Western urban landscapes. It has been the medium used by the disempowered, the homeless, and the suffering for fickle protection and shelter, and it has historically disquieted us with the ramifications of gross income inequality. I have wondered: have the inequalities simply been reshuffled in this time of neoliberalism, made less visible due to the constant movement and obscuration of waste? How can the tactile exposition of this waste indicate the excesses of our consumption, propelled by conglomerate corporations? Can we look at cardboard to measure and thereby demonstrate individual agency within the socioeconomic systems that too often seem beyond our control?

I have been influenced by new materialist philosophies, which, as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost argue, “are needed to do justice to the complexities of twenty-first-century biopolitics and political economy, because they raise fundamental questions about the place of embodied humans in a material world and the ways that we produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment” (New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, 2010).

While I have explored the material through my own subjective handling (see ‘A Dance of Scales’, 2019), with continued interest in instigating interaction within and among the public (see ‘International Juried Exhibition’, 2018), and the environmental or ecological implications of such ‘glocal’ waste and its management (see ‘It Got Brighter’), I have rounded out this series by bringing it into an interdisciplinary, theoretical research conversation around ‘manifolds’ (see ‘One Fold, Two Fold’, 2020).

The sensation of folding, evident in the construction of cardboard, can describe the “folding” collapse of a business operation or a hand in a game of cards. The literary notion of the manifold — to be multifarious, multitudinous, multiplex, or myriad — has been used to describe the methodology of multiplying — creating, as the art world may recognize, Walter-Benjaminian impressions. The manifold is a kind of artistic assemblage, a kind of waste management that is, at times, generative or even necessary for the evolution of creative archives (see, in application to literature and film, ‘Manifolds in Media’ by Dr Orchid Tierney, 2020). Within topology, a subfield of mathematics, the term ‘manifold’ refers to a variety of morphing geometric shapes — an interesting way to think about the indeterminate variability of geometries of cardboard boxes, commercial architectures that we build our society with and continually disseminate. Although these visual shapes and configurations familiar to topologists are applicable to a wide range of scientific inquiries within the physical universe, perhaps the most publicly recognizable are the layers of the stock market lines, of the dips and folds of an economy (see ‘Manifolds in Maths’ by Dr Mehdi Yazdi, 2020). Finally, looking at Kantian philosophy, a “manifold of sense” refers to “the unorganized sum of the particulars furnished to the mind,” unified by our understanding, a kind of synthetic activity.

Among many definitions and approaches, in application to my creative practice, I have lingered on the definition by John Huntley Skrine, who, in 1889, wrote that we can simply think of a manifold as “the chosen abstraction which gathers up into a focus […] human duty, experience, and hope.”

Series Details:
West Philadelphia / New York
Deptford / London
Venice / London
Peckham / London
Kensington / London

© Gina DeCagna, 2016–2020